Living without Windows!

Introduction

As I left my new house in a desolate "polder" in the Netherlands,
I saw a bright white light beam down from the sky, and a thundering voice
spoke to me in a strange, but not unfamiliar, tongue. Then, all went blue
and as soon as I regained conciousness it dawned on me that I had been
given a mission: to try and "Live without Windows". Not one for careful
contemplation, I immediately removed Windows from my laptop and installed
Linux.

Unfortunately, we live in a Windows world. Almost all of my collegues,
co-workers, friends and customers use Windows and, more importantly, Windows
applications. They insist on storing stuff on NT servers, print via NT
print servers and sending me files created with Windows applications. I
regularly need to be able to retrieve, read and print these files. Can
I survive just running Linux? What problems will I run into? Would I still
be able to interoperate with others in any meaningful way?

In any case, there is no turning back now. My hard disk has been cleansed
and I am writing this in the Netscape HTML Composer running under SuSE
Linux 5.3. The next few months will be interesting times as I have decided
to go on Living without Windows!

In this series of articles, you can read about my experiences as I move
between the great unwashed and try to interoperate with them. What problems
have I run into? How did I solve them? Whom have I turned over to the true
belief?

The motto

"It is easier to take a multi-tasking, multi-user, operating
system and run it on the desktop, than it is to take a single user operating
system and run it as a server."